The Cube building in downtown Calgary is one of four office conversions carried out by Strategic Group
We talked to Ken Toews, senior vice-president of development at Strategic Group, about the benefits of office-to-residential conversions and how they can help solve the housing crisis.A little more than six years ago we saw a problem with office vacancy, and we didn’t think it was going to go away. We had quite a few office buildings in our portfolio, so we thought weto do something about this before it got worse.
We’ve got a crisis on our hands, and with the amount of immigration anticipated in the coming years, it’s going to be a challenge to build housing fast enough. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation explained in a recent report that housing stock will increase by 2.3 million units by 2030. That’s not enough:
In older buildings, windows and siding and insulation often require updating. The solution is usually to wrap the building in a new envelope, which costs $75 a square foot. Adequate parking is also a common challenge. In one of our Edmonton buildings, originally we could only include parking for 20 per cent of the units, so we ended up integrating a new three-story underground parkade on an adjacent property.
StrategicGrp I predicted this in June 2020. City centres will be vibrant and active, as they should be, in the next 5-10 years... suburbia is for kids! :-)
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